In Your Garage

October '07

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

October, 2007

KARMANN, GET IT
Patricia and Thomas Jetzer live in Granger, Indiana. They were born and raised in Switzerland, and Patricia has always had a fascination with cars. While she was working for an RV dealership, she fell in love with a 1973 GMC Canyon Land RV and bought it. "We were looking for something to pull behind the motorhome. We saw a Karmann Ghia and thought it would be neat to pull the Ghia behind the GMC," she writes.

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But as it turned out, she liked driving the car so much it became her daily driver. "We have decided to keep it and make it nice. It has some spots that needed to be done. My husband, who is a car mechanic and worked as a foreman for a GM dealership, did the floor and the wheelhouses. Other than that, it looks like original," says Patricia. "I use the Karmann Ghia as my daily driver to go to the bank or shopping or just cruising around. I love to drive it; there is no power steering or a/c, but it is a head turner, and a lot of people recognize the form but are not sure whether it is a Volkswagen or a Porsche."
E-TYPE AMBITIONS
Dr. David Spellberg of Naples, Florida, is up to his stethoscope in the restoration of a 1964 Jaguar E-Type roadster. He sent along photographs of his current project on the car: stripping and repairing the legendary cat's bonnet. "The engine is being rebuilt now," says Dr. Spellberg, "and the car will be repainted back to its original black color. We're hoping to have the car finished by the end of the summer." Think he's going to keep the flame job on the guide coat?
GUTEN MORGAN
Our Driveable Dream features are consistently the cars about which we receive the most mail. You can see plenty of restored cars, but it's refreshing to find some owners who drive, display and enjoy cars with the bumps and scars that inevitably come from a lifetime of use.
Byron LeVan of Mohnton, Pennsylvania, is one of those owners. "I enjoy your monthly article about classic, unrestored cars that are driven as they are intended to be," Byron writes. "I have an unrestored Morgan in less than perfect condition. It has the original top and seats and was repainted, poorly, some 20 years ago." Looks pretty good to us, and we bet it looks even better from the driver's seat.
Byron didn't stop there with his collection, either. He's also got a great selection of vintage racing cars, including a LeGrand, a Begra and a Grady Alpha.

This article originally appeared in the October, 2007 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.